A/HRC/41/54 creates a “foreign controlled large-scale mining economy in the continent”.63 According to the International Alliance on Natural Resources in Africa, a continental network of 51 nongovernmental and community-based organizations, communities in mining areas are often left worse off by mining operations, which are typically conducted by transnational corporations. The Alliance notes that “entire villages across Africa have been forcibly removed from their ancestral land, in many cases with no replacement. Members of communities on mineral-rich land, including traditional leaders, women, children, and the elderly, have been arrested and imprisoned for protecting the only land they have, which is often their only source of livelihood, and for exercising their right to protest. Rivers, land, and crops have been contaminated from mining processes and communities have lost access to water sources.”64 40. Although some countries in North-East Asia, such as the Republic of Korea, undertook radical land reforms, most South-East Asian countries inherited “extractive colonial institutions” that perpetuated income inequality. 65 Even in Asia, commentators identify State preferences for transnational mining corporations, and the dominance of legal and policy frameworks that privilege the interests of these corporations over those of smallscale, artisanal mining. One result of this structure has been territorial conflicts involving small-scale and artisanal miners, who face death, injury and loss of property. One scholar argues that the physical infrastructure and modern bureaucracy created by colonial regimes remain largely intact in South-East Asian countries and have allowed income inequality to persist today.66 41. Corporations are subject to due diligence, transparency and human rights requirements and some have admirably supported such standards and pledged to support the rights of indigenous peoples. At the same time, the status quo does not yet place a meaningful check on the global reach of transnational extractive companies. Corporations remain able to extract resources at rates that disproportionately benefit shareholders over local communities. Unlike States, these corporations are often better positioned to weather the fluctuations of the market, and typically escape any form of meaningful accountability. 42. The dominance in the extractivism economy of countries in the global North and hegemonic countries from the global South benefits such countries and their transnational corporations at the continuing expense of most countries of extraction in the global South. This is a racial equality concern because those who bear the greatest cost of the extractivism economy are those peoples who were formerly colonized on the grounds of false claims of their racial inferiority. In other words, it is those people who, under the colonial extractivism economy, were socially constructed as non-white or non-European that today remain subordinate, excluded and marginal within the global extractivism economy. 43. This global picture of political economy steeped in sovereign inequality should be understood as, in some respects, similar in operation to ongoing indigenous sovereign subordination, which is the root of the human rights violations confronting indigenous peoples in situations in which extractivism is concerned. Their persisting vulnerability to abuse and exploitation is based on their precarious sovereignty in the face of State and nonState actors willing to use military force, if necessary, to impose putative development projects that undermine indigenous self-determination and world views and fuel gross human rights violations in indigenous groups. Historical legacies persist, as even the doctrine of discovery continues to facilitate the mass appropriation of the lands, territories and resources of indigenous peoples (E/C.19/2010/13). 63 64 65 66 12 See Gavin Hilson, “Small-scale mining, poverty and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa: an overview”, Resources Policy, vol. 34, Nos. 1–2. https://ianra.org/images/images/PDFs/Case-Studies.pdf, introduction. See Wonik Kim, “Rethinking colonialism and the origins of the developmental State in East Asia”, Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 39, No. 3. Ibid.